Burn the manuscript

From the Chronicle, about the sit-ins at Columbia, and associated depredations (h/t to Cliopatria):

Like other faculty members, Ranum scrambled to stop the sit-ins. Unlike any of them, he did so in full academic regalia, climbing through the window of President Grayson Kirk's office, in Low Memorial Library, wearing, as usual, a flowing black gown.

"I did that as dramatically as I could," Ranum said. "I was in fine shape, and I was interested in the demonstrators as a political historian. To me the world is a laboratory to understand the past." Once inside Low, he concluded that Rudd, although a strong leader and a superb tactician, had only a limited grasp of issues, including the issue of whether it was legitimate to use violence to advance the radical cause.

"I explained that they should get out of there, that the possibility for their punishment would go up the longer they stayed, and, if they did get out now, this might be treated more as a prank than as a political act," Ranum told the university's oral-history project about a month later. "I held over their heads, as dramatically and forcefully as I could, the possibility of a counterrevolution at Columbia, and I said that the United States is a fundamentally liberal society but with politically conservative, authoritarian elements, and that, rather than accept a radicalized university, the society would snuff out the university—and that I for one would prefer the existing state to the totalitarian state which a counterrevolution would bring about."

Neither argument had any effect on the protesters, who believed that the people of Harlem were going to rise up and join the demonstration, turning a campus rebellion into a biracial revolt. To Ranum, that was fanciful thinking. The radicals, most of them upper-middle-class white kids, spoke a language most Harlem residents would find incomprehensible: the language of Marxism. They regarded the university as the "soft underbelly" of capitalism and believed shutting it down would provoke change. "They did not want to come out, I believe, except by the police," Ranum told the oral-history project. "They needed the issue of the police. They needed the issue of police brutality, further to radicalize the campus."

David B. Truman, the popular, energetic dean whom Kirk put in charge of handling the crisis, had come to the same conclusion. "Calling the police would have given the SDS the confrontation that for months and longer they had been seeking. It would also have activated the strong faculty aversion to having the police on campus," he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. When the police were finally called in, a week after the building occupations began, things went as disastrously as Truman had expected. More than 700 people were arrested, and nearly 150 were injured in the violence that accompanied the raid.

The raid produced an angry backlash against the university and generated enormous sympathy for the protesters. Rudd and the SDS chapter were propelled to national prominence, making them de facto leaders of the New Left. But the student members still faced suspension or expulsion for their role in the rebellion, and they had it in for Ranum, who, after meeting with them in Low Library, had put out a mimeographed statement saying that the only alternative to police action would be for the students occupying the buildings to seize control of the demonstration from SDS.

I'm interested here in the shifting emphasis and valuation of personal, in the most concrete, almost physiological sense--flowing robes, prestige--and quite abstracted political motives. Accusations of hypocrisy on one side, ambition and stupidity on the other; claims to political 'seriousness' on both. A professor getting out of place by giving political advice to students and students getting quite literally out of place (setting scholarship on fire). The soft underbelly of capitalism is at least as confused and 'ideological' an idea as the belief that reasoned discourse prevails in university administration. What a comfortingly ambiguous and meaningless footnote on the late 1960s.

squabbling children

...und die sich durch den Widerspruch mit sich selbst die Freude erkaufen, miteinander im Widerspruche zu bleiben.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. $205

The Persistence of the Marxist Paradigm

Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. Pantheon Books. 1981.

The Persistence of the Old Regime is an interpretive historical essay that at its heart is an explanation for the disjunction between the promise of ‘advanced’ European civilization in the 19th century, and the 30 year war of 1914-1945 that essentially ended this civilization. Mayer’s argument, constantly reiterated, is that the aristocrats never went away. Nobilitarian structures of sociability and authority, the weight of agrarian economic power, the ‘human material’ of the aristocracy, all retained enormous importance through the 19th century. The old elite elements of the ruling classes reasserted their authority in the face of challenges in the years after 1900. In short, “the Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy” (4). Historians have been wrong to see the 19th century as that of the rising bourgeoisie, “the economically radical bourgeoisie was as obsequious in cultural life as it was in social relations and political behavior” (192). This argument relies on the mobilization of a very broad range of secondary material, but a few important names are Joseph Schumpeter, Norbert Elias, and, in a more oblique manner, Carl Schorske. The argument is something like a European-wide application of the version of the German sonderweg thesis that blames Germany’s peculiar history on incomplete modernization.

I’ve run across referenced to this book in a few places, but most often in Frederic Jameson. Mayer is clearly putting forward a radical revision of the standard Marxist interpretation of the 19th century and the causes of the First World War. The question is, to my mind, then not so much what is the contemporary historiographical importance of this book—it might well have been a provocation to the ‘new social history’ of the 1980s, but the very historical categories with which it works, such as ‘bourgeoisie’ have been by now more or less run out of the field—as it is what place it has in contemporary Marxism. Probably I have already the answer to this question: it is as a foundational work for the kind of Marxist literary analysis for which Jameson is best known. The imagine Mayer gives us of the 1890s and on provides an excellent frame in which to discuss cultural modernism. It is not, I therefore think, a coincidence that France is both a problematic case for Mayer, and for ‘modernism’ as an analytic category in the history of literature.

Since I am most interested in France, I’ll talk about it, although I don’t exactly mean to criticize Mayer here, since his scope is much larger. France is problematic in obvious ways. It was the only republic among the European great powers. The monarchy and the aristocracy had been officially dissolved with great violence during the Revolution, and were then reconstituted and once again dissolved several times. In the 1870s, one of the conditions for the possibility of the Republic was that the monarchists were divided among themselves and relatively weak. The Second Empire certainly had an aristocracy, but it was much debased. The two places Mayer can with confidence say the old aristocracy retained some power were the social world—le tout Paris—and in military and foreign affairs. For Mayer, then, Proust’s novel would be read not so much for its evidence of social change and arrivisme, but rather as a portrait of the enormous influence still wielded by the aristocracy, and the desperate attempts of the upper bourgeoisie to imitate its social betters. The empire was the provenance of the nobles and therefore at the disposal of the Catholic Church. I am willing to entertain this thesis, although I think it’s hard to deny the republicanism of the empire in the 1890s and after.

Mayer also places a classical education, literary classicism, and nationalism, in the camp of the old regime. This I don’t think can really be sustained for the case of France. Certainly, all of these were claimed by the ‘conservative bloc,’ but the école normale was simply not an institution of the old regime. It was republican through and through, which is not to say that it was not conservative—in a sense it was—but this is a bourgeois institution if there ever was one. The elites it reproduced were radically separate to anything that might with plausibility be called the nobility. They were nationalist, certainly, but the Republic survived because it was able to convince so many people that it was coextensive with the nation. Literary classicism, similarly, may have been claimed by the Maurras and his fellow travelers, but it was certainly not equal to them. The literary institutions of the Third Republic were, again, in a sense conservative, but I would call this a conservatism fundamental to any institutional structure, not at all one that points back to the aristocracy. Proust is an exception here, not a rule—and of course if he was hypnotized by the aristocrats, it is just because he wasn’t one. Mayer in general is eager to read the cultural elitism of assimilated Jews all over Europe as an attempt to get as close to the aristocrats as possible, given their basic exclusion, rather than as an investment in a genuinely alternative elite. I am inclined, in France but also Germany and Austria, to take the latter perspective. Not to be picky, but my trust in Mayer (which is to say, in the secondary accounts on which he relies) is undermined by odd miss-evaluations, such as putting Alfred Fouillée into the box of academics expounding “somewhat more orderly versions of the baleful creed of permanent struggle, elitism, and unreason” (295). Fouillée is not like Renan, de Lapouge, Haeckel, or Gumplowitz. Rather than being a grand-uncle to fascism, he is the grand-father of the welfare state. The fact that he coined the phrase, used several times by Mayer, ‘idée-force,’ with its superficially Nietzschean overtones, does not stop him from being, in fact, the 19th century philosopher of conciliation and compromise.

Although I’m less knowledgeable about this than I should be, I also found that Mayer’s account of the French economy did not exactly support his thesis. In the French context, he often slides into the use of the word ‘notable,’ rather than ‘noble,’ and indeed the two are not the same. Mayer marshals the evidence that the French economy did not have a massive heavy industry sector, was not dynamic in the way Germany or Britain’s industry was. Agriculture remained important, but also undercapitalized. Evidence of the political power of the well-to-do peasant does not, it seems to me, constitute evidence that the nobles were in control. Again, it was precisely because the Third Republic was able to convince this sector of the population to support it that it was able to survive. No doubt, I should read Herman Lebovic’s The Alliance of Iron and Wheat.

I am, in general, sympathetic to Mayer’s basic point that in order to understand historical change, we must think also about what failed to change. I am also, in the end, sympathetic to the claim that the best explanatory framework for Europe’s descent into what was manifestly an insane war is the increasingly desperate series of attempts made by the old elites to retain political power. Mayer’s argument makes the least sense to me in the realm at which I think it is in the end aimed, that is, culture. He constantly explains away instances of avant-gardism by saying that they were ‘over-perceived’ at the time. I again agree with the basic criticism that art and literary histories tend to exaggerate the contemporary importance of certain innovators (generally in the service of a teleology of one sort or another), and ignore the weight of ‘academic’ work. Still, I can’t really get past Mayer’s dismissal of the radicalism of, say, The Rite of Spring. His framework, perhaps because it is Marxist, is too ready to evacuate of revolutionary content the very real formal innovations taking place at this moment. The implication that modernism, as a style, is a sort of sublimated obeisance to the ancient aristocracy simply doesn’t convince. In the end, the question I'm left with is how much explanatory power remains in the Marxist--as opposed to that derived from Weber or Elias--part of Mayer's analysis?

International Hegel

Some questions I want to ask, in order of increasing importance about Alexandre Kojève’s reading (taken from the introductory essay, pgs 11-34 of the larger book), of the Master-Slave dialectic: translation, source, portability.

I know that in the 1860s, a first translation of various parts of Hegel’s corpus, including the Phenomenology was made into French by an Italian philosopher named Augusto Verà. It is said to be a terrible translation, and the little of it that I have looked at has lead me to think the same thing. A new translation was made by Jean Hyppolite (it was not, as Hyppolite’s wikipedia.fr entry says, in fact the first), but my understanding is that this was done after, or at least in tandem with, the seminar. What, then, is the relation of the French text we get in Kojève’s introduction to Hyppolite’s later translation? A few hours of real research (I’d look at Roth’s book, and a few others) would clear all that up. As I read through, I’d thought that I was noticing discrepancies, in particular with Kojève’s use of the phrase “la négativité-négatrice,” but looking back to the two that I noted, things are not so inconsistent as I thought—although I still don’t quite understand why, in $194, Hegel’s phrase “die absolute Negativität” (which Pinkard renders, “absolute negativity”), is given in French as “la négativité-négatrice absolu.” Going through systematically would be time-consuming and redundant. Should have done it the first time around.

Where does this way of thinking about Hegel come from? At first, I was unconvinced that Kovève’s reading had very much to do with the original text—and still I’m curious about how well it fits with the remainder of the Phenomenology—but in the end I am convinced by Kojève’s ability to make sense out of enormously obscure language that he must be onto something. I have a superficial understanding, from various reading around this famous seminar, that Kojève is in some sense using Heidegger to read Hegel as a commentator on Marx. I see quite clearly the sense in which this reading of Hegel does things to Marx. I do not yet understand precisely where Heidegger fits into things. Perhaps the terrifying passages on existential disintegration as the first step on the path to authentic human being?

Finally, portability. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that this text from 1939 contains much that will be important for Sartre, but more interestingly, Lacan. I was in fact most surprised by the degree to which Kojève’s way of thinking about the nature of the Master authorizes what I understand of Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis. This is entirely aside from the use of ‘jouissance’ as a technical term in Kojève, as well as the related dialectics of desire and recognition. Obviously, these are all yet more crucial for Lacan than Sartre. The idea of emancipatory totalitarianism works better as a tool to explode the clinical relationship from within than it does as, say, politics. In the end, it is very difficult to read, “c’est par le travail effectué dans l’angoisse au service du Maître que l’Esclave se libère de l’angoisse qui l’asservissait au Maître” (31) without thinking, “Arbeit macht frei.”